Phillip Ernest elaborates on his life in Toronto, the city to which he fled at the age of fifteen, on his first university studies there when he was thirty, and on the writing of the Sanskrit vampire story entited The Vetalathat LLP publishes on March 10th.

Phillip Ernest is a Canadian writer with an extraordinary personal history, as even the briefest version of his bio suggests:

Born in 1970, Phillip Ernest grew up in New Liskeard, Ontario. Fleeing home at fifteen, he lived on Toronto’s skid row until he was twenty-eight. He learned Sanskrit from the book Teach Yourself Sanskrit, and later earned a BA in South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto and a PhD in Sanskrit from Cambridge University. The Vetala(LLP, 2018)is his first novel.

I had read Andrew Lang’s collections of fairy tales as a child and later as an adult. In university I also read David Hume’s philosophy, which provided a pathway out of dingles and a ladder out of wells of wishful thinking. Through fantasy or fact, the geography of dramatic basalt rock formations, covered in green, obviously came into being through the forces of eons for the sole purpose of providing dancing venues under moonlight and feeding our insatiable need for stories.

“I tell you. I fell in love with a tree. I couldn’t not. It was in blossom. It was a day like other days and I was on my way to work, walking the same way as usual between our house and the town” (Ali Smith).

Well, I fell in love with Scotland. I couldn’t not, although flowering trees had little to do with it.

My father died twenty years ago and I cannot listen to Leonard Cohen without mourning him. As I write, I’m listening to his copy of Cohen’s album Songs from a Room. “What is a saint?” Cohen asks in Beautiful Losers, and he answers himself, “I think it has something to do with the energy of love.”

ICAROS: A VISION, the internationally acclaimed film by Leonor Caraballo & Matteo Norzi, produced by Abou Farman, will be screening in Canada, starting in Vancouver on July 28th, where it opens for a week-long run at Vancouver International Film Festival, Vancity Theatre, and then in Montreal as part of Montreal First People's Festival Présence autochthone on August 7th, Cinéma du Parc, 7 p.m.

Read on for a synopsis and some of the sensationally good reviews of the film which was producer by LLP | LLÉ author Abou Farman. Not to be missed.

It’s 1974, a coup has just installed a repressive military regime in Ethiopia. A family of five undertakes to escape from Addis Ababa to Djibouti, cross the brutal Danakil Desert on foot. Beth Gebreyohannes, a young girl at the time, describes that grim, perilous journey. Betrayed by guides and robbed by bandits, lost in the desert without food or water, they are rescued finally by a trading caravan of nomadic Afar tribesmen, complete strangers who feed and guide them on to Djibouti.

The Nobel prize-winning St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott died on March 17, 2017, at the age of 87. Ingrid Bejerman remembers her first meeting with him in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2000, and her last at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival in 2006.